We have an object system like Moose on Perl 5 now with Roles and all; So I don't see why we couldn't have one on a cleaned up Perl 5 (the hypothetical Perl 6). Same goes for grammars, they're halfway there in Perl 5.10. Custom operators are there in 5.12 with ugly parser hooks, etc.

We've had 10 years of very productive Perl 5 development. It would have been very interesting to see what those 10 years would have been like had some of the uglier parts of the core been deprecated in favor of some of the features in Perl 6.

As for the JVM I don't think I'm that wrong. I'll give you continuations and coroutines but lightweight concurrency? Have you looked at Clojure? Its hello world demo is a ~100 thread application and it's been known to run up to a thousand threads or so pushing a few gigabytes of data per second around on a few hundred cores. It also does multimethods (Lisp-style). And in any case the JVM seems to be able to emulate these things just fine even if you don't use its native calling conventions.

Anyway discussing VMs for some of the more fancy Perl 6 features is getting a bit sidetracked (although I'd still be interested in why some of the Lisp VMs weren't adapted).

I just wanted to reply to the OP (without any hostilities) who was curious as to what the "hysteria" might be about. My posting sought to aggregate some of the most common concerns that I've heard. That's all.

For a lot of people (including me) Perl 5 is what pays the bills. There isn't a single company (correct me if I'm wrong) that's doing Perl 6 development (despite claims that "you can use it today!").

I think it's understandable given all that that 10 years later we only have a pre-alpha implementation and little uptake, and bad some bad PR for Perl externally.

Marketing

Q: How can you market Perl 6?

A: You cannot. It's not ready for the market. I'd argue it's
not
pre-alpha. You can run it and write useful things with it
today. But it's not stable enough or close enough to feature complete
to be something that any sane tech managers would be bundling up as
the engine for a vendible product.

The question this leads to is "What will happen if you try to
market
Perl 6 now, aka, too early?" The same thing that would have happened
to Apple if they'd tried to market the iPod early. Ridicule,
skepticism at best. Loss of attention. High resistance to adoption on
launch.

PR

Q: How can you do public relations for Perl 6?

A: Like Perl 5 has begun to do. Iron Man Perl, EPO, Summer
of Code,
etc. Should you? No, not yet! The only thing it can serve to do is
fuel skepticism and ridicule again. How many years did it take for
Perl to get out from under the "it's too slow" meme? Ten? It only
finally has because Java was, and Ruby is, slower still so most of the
rats finally shut up about it. Imagine another ten years of that shite
because the world at large experiences early, unoptimized Perl 6 which
makes Ruby look like Erlang.

External PR for Perl 6 cannot help anyone. It just serves to cause
sideshows like the last couple threads and reinforce the idea that
there is confusion simply because there are some who are confused. I'm
not a Perl 6 dev or even a user, I've written fewer than 10 toy
scripts in it so far, but I knew the answers to most of the concerns
because I pay attention to the community.

Perl 6 smells wonderful to me but it is half-baked. Only a
desperate, addled chef rings the dinner bell now.

Now, this–

We've had 10 years of very productive Perl 5
development. It would have been very interesting to see what those 10
years would have been like had some of the uglier parts of the core
been deprecated in favor of some of the features in Perl 6.

–has been refuted in this thread already as both impossible
and actively detrimental to the goal it sets out. If you haven't
worked on the implementation of those parts of the core, this feels
mildly insulting and just disconnected from reality. It's the "Why
can't I have a pony?" again. Because ponies are really actually not as
easy as they look to a little kid.

If you're not going to get personally involved in developing and
writing code for Perl 6, just pretend it doesn't exist or frankly it
seems to me you're actively hurting its progress. These
discussions—which are outside of the regular lists, meetings,
and decision making process—don't clarify or improve the
prognosis and they are, obviously from the OP, actively
irritating and potentially detrimental to the only persons trying to
deliver the thing. I've nearly quit projects before from getting
critiques, even ones I may have deserved, which were delivered out of
turn or without etiquette. I can't imagine what it would be like to deal with it on a continuous basis. I wouldn't blame anyone who wouldn't put up with it.

Q: Do you want Perl 6?

A: Backseat driving can only serve to slow the trip down and
make the drivers start to hate their task. No one does, or can be
expected to do, a good job when it stops being fun. Help keep it
fun. If you're still impatient, go evangelize for Perl 5; it's better
all the time and its critics are easier to counter.

Suppose for a moment that I buy your argument that it's too early to do marketing for Perl 6 - then how should we attract contributors, when nobody knows about it? And without contributors, how are we ever going to get to a point where it's ready for marketing, by your reckoning?

Saying "Don't to marketing for Perl 6 yet" is basically the same as saying "Don't bother at all".

Perl 6 smells wonderful to me but it is half-baked. Only a desperate, addled chef rings the dinner bell now.

I for one don't try to announce Perl 6 as a finished dinner. If people ask me, I plainly tell them that Perl 6 isn't very mature yet, but if they care I still try to drive their appetite - after all some people like it when their steak isn't cooked through, or to pinch a bit while cooking.

I see your point. I was speaking specifically to the idea that the world outside the Perl community needs the marketing. I think marketing there is a mistake and has more downside than up for the immediate future. I also think marketing is a mismatch with attracting contributors. Marketing, at face value, is attracting buyers. I know we're talking about it in a broader sense but I think it's an important distinction.

It probably is the time to ramp up the call for participation and use internally. When devs like me, firmly in the "not an internals hacker" type, are starting to get interested on our own, we probably just need a bit more direction from the "core" team. I'm a good example. I'm smart enough to help with certain pieces but by no means smart enough to dig in from the top and find where I should be trying to help.

This is difficult timing also because Perl 5 got *much* more interesting in the last 2-5 years. Moose, Plack, DBIC, Catalyst, DateTime, KiokuDB, FormFu, and so many more… I'm just starting to get good at some of that and it's fun and exciting and takes all extra tuits. And Perl 6's discussions are often awfully meta. The kind of stuff that only about 15 of the "Saints in our Book" can even follow. So it's intimidating as much as exciting.

A core of tutorials and projects could go miles to getting the mid-level devs like me more engaged. It would be a huge amount of work for whoever took it on though and it might be early even for that. We're the second wave. The ones who will do a lot of the "ant" work of carrying pebbles from Perl 5 to 6 ("porting" CPAN). The really smart cats who should be on the job now, seem to be to me. I'm personally in no hurry and I don't see that anyone is doing anything wrong while working on Perl 6 in any capacity he or she chooses. So don't mistake my disdain for much of this but-what-if/where's-my-pony for criticism. I'm just happy it's chugging along at any speed.

Um… I seem to have written myself into a corner without any strong finisher. Go team!